XK72 | Java and Adobe Flash Software

The next major release of Charles is at a stage where I’d like more people to have a go using it, send feedback and find bugs before I roll it out properly. Charles 3.2 has been in development for the last six months in parallel with the maintenance of 3.1; it includes a number of major new features, redesign of existing features and new built-in help text.

The biggest new feature is Breakpoints, accessible from the reorganised Proxy menu (several things have moved there from the Tools menu). Breakpoints let you intercept and edit a request or response before they are passed on.

All of the tools have received a UI overhaul to make configuring and using them easier. Editing is now done in a pop up dialog rather than inline in the table view, and the location matching has been broken out into its constituent parts and documented in much more detail. You can also now enable each row in a tool separately so you can manage a few different configurations.

Charles saved sessions now have a new suffix .chls and can now be double-clicked to open Charles on Windows and Mac OS X. This makes them much more useful of course. Charles can also now open raw AMF dumps with suffixes .amf, .amf0 and .amf3 for those of you developing with AMF.

In December Adobe released the AMF3 specification. It was great to see that the community’s reverse engineering efforts had hit the nail on the head pretty much everywhere. With the specification they also released the BlazeDS reference implementation (soon to be open source). Charles 3.2 now supports BlazeDS so you can debug your BlazeDS applications! Previously versions of Charles couldn’t parse some of the AMF3 used by BlazeDS.

There are a few other changes and additions hidden in there as well. I have been using Charles 3.2 continuously throughout its development so I’m confident that it works well enough to release as a public beta! Please download and try it out and let me know how you get on, even if that’s just “works fine”.

Download the latest beta from http://xk72.com/charles/beta.php

Thanks!
Karl